EDITORIAL: Annals of Russian Betrayal

The ink was not even dry on Russia’s signature accepting hideously watered-down sanctions against the crazed Islamic dictatorship in Iran when Russian diplomats were trash-talking, undermining and betraying the nations of the West that Russia had just supposedly supported.

No intelligent person can be surprised by this action, of course, given that the vast majority of movers and shakers in the Kremlin are proud KGB spies. But it does not seem there are any intelligent people in the administration of U.S. President Barack Obama. In fact, they’re not only too stupid to be surprised, they’re too stupid to even notice what is happening.

We are appalled both by Obama’s mendacity and his stupidity. How could Obama stoop so low as to claim there was anything remotely meaningful in his Iran sanctions measure, which is in fact no different than many previous efforts of the Bush administration? And how could he possibly be so idiotic as to imagine that the malignant forces of the Kremlin would allow him to get away with his propagandistic scheme for long?

An article we republish in today’s issue by a Standford professor writing in the San Fransisco Chronicle points out that when Dima Medvedev made a recent jaunt to see Obama, he preceded his visit by sending a Russian warship. The author muses that Medvedev could have sent a ballet company or a cultural show, but instead he chose a ship of war. The meaning of this gesture is not lost on any thinking person, but apparently there are few if any of those in the Obama administration.

Obama, like Neville Chamberlain before him, is unfazed by this betrayal, and goes merrily on handing out unilateral concessions to Russia. There can be only one result of such a policy: to encourage more of the same. Obama, whose foreign policy has essential ground to a halt all around the world, seems happy to collect anything that appears to be progress for the United States, anything he can sell to the public in the next election as progress, rather than actually achieving anything. And if he has to sell human rights and post-Soviet allies, and the people of Russia for that matter, down the river, so be it.

This is an administration that will live in infamy.

The Obama administration is not alone, of course. There are still a few malignant and/or idiotic multi-national corporations who are willing to give aid and comfort to the Putin dictatorship in return for succor, and we report on one in today’s issue, namely Cisco Systems. Any company investing money in Putin’s Russia is betraying its stockholders by risking their investments in a country whose economy is nothing more than a rigged gambling casino, and betraying all the citizens of the world by helping Putin cover up his outrageous abuses at home and abroad.

They products are not worth your money. They’re certainly not worth ours, and won’t be getting any.

10 responses to “EDITORIAL: Annals of Russian Betrayal”

As usual, the Russians smile at you while trying to stab you in the back:

Suspected Russian spies charged in US

Ten people have been arrested in the US and charged with spying for Russia.

They were allegedly part of an operation where agents posed as ordinary citizens, some living together as couples for years.

They are accused of conspiracy to act as unlawful agents of a foreign government, a crime which carries up to five years in prison.

……..

Alleged intercepted messages in court documents suggest they were asked to find information on topics including nuclear weapons, US arms control positions, Iran, White House rumours, CIA leadership turnover, and political parties.

The US Department of Justice says eight of the suspects allegedly carried out “long-term, ‘deep-cover’ assignments” on US soil, working in civilian jobs so as not to arouse suspicion.

They were allegedly trained by the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) to infiltrate policy-making circles and collect information, according to court papers filed in the US court for the southern district of New York.

They were told to befriend US officials and send information using various methods to Russian government handlers.

US officials said the spy-ring was discovered in a “multi-year investigation” by FBI agents who posed as Russian handlers and gleaned information from two of the suspects.

Ten alleged secret agents of the Russian government living in “deep-cover” in the United States and engaged in Cold War-style espionage have been arrested in a coordinated operation by the FBI.

The FBI accuses the SVR, the successor organisation to the Soviet Union’s KGB, of running a network of “illegals”, described in court documents as Russians who received training in languages, codes and ciphers, invisible writing and counter-surveillance before living in the United States under false identities.
Each of the 10 was charged with conspiracy to act as an agent of a foreign government, which carries a maximum penalty of five years in prison on conviction.

They were alleged to have met US government officials given codenames such as “Farmer”, “Parrot” and “Cat” as well as engaging such tried and tested espionage methods as dead drops and brush passes.
The arrests come after President Barack Obama met his Russian counterpart Dmitry Medvedev in Washington, praising him as a “solid and reliable partner” and taking him out to a burger restaurant.
As well as the 10 arrested in New Jersey, New York, Massachusetts and Virginia over the weekend, the FBI identified an eleventh suspect, known as “Christopher R. Metsos” who remains at large.
The nature of their work was said to have been outlined in a secret message to two of those arrested: “You were sent to USA for long-term service trip.
“Your education, bank accounts, car, house etc – all those serve one goal: fulfil your main mission, i.e. to search and develop ties in policy-making circles in US …”

Moscow, June 29 (Interfax) – Officials who disagree with President Barack Obama’s policy aimed at “resetting” relations with Moscow are responsible for the ongoing scandal surrounding the arrest of a group of people in the United States charged with spying for the Russian government, Nikolai Kovalyov, a former director of the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB), told Interfax.

“I think that certain ‘technicians’ are trying to infect the U.S. president’s “reset” program with some destructive virus,” said Kovalyov, who today heads the veterans committee in the lower chamber of Russia’s parliament.

Kovalyov said he was speaking about senior officials of U.S. special services.

“Certainly, it cannot be a simple coincidence that this group of ‘exposed Russian spies’ was arrested immediately after the visit of President of Russia Dmitry Medvedev to the U.S.,” he said.

Leave it to Dimunitive Dima to pull the wool
over the eyes of Gullible Hussein . Even while
they were exulting over a ” bright and solid
future ” , moscovite spies here , were being arrested . According to national security
agencies , there are more moscovite spies here
now , than there were during the Cold War !
Is this one of the changes Hussein Obama was
talking about in his election campaign speeches ?
If it is , than I can’t wait for the others .

My dream is that some day somebody invents something like a telephone or an Internet, so that all these alleged “Russian agents” could send their findings to their alleged “SVR bosses” via email, instead of having to “engage in such tried and tested espionage methods as dead drops and brush passes“.

It doesn’t surprise me that the F-B-I copies the actions of Stalin’s K-G-B which also arrested civilians on trumped up charges of being “American agents and passing secret information to the C-I-A agents via dead drops and brush passes”. But that was done 60 years ago. Why does the FBI blindly copy the N-K-V-D methods from 1950 not realizing that in 2010 no sane person will believe their stories about “dead drops and brush passes”, when the Internet is available to everybody, including you and me.

Really ReTaRd, there were no trumped up charges. The charges are all quite real.

The agents concerned were caught red handed talking to their handlers, their communications were listened to and decoded. They were even filmed by the FBI meeting handlers from the SVR.

They were communicating over the internet you moron, thats why a whole lot of the evidence against them talks about posting information encrypted in photo’s on websites etc.

The older methods are still used as a backup against someone getting access to your email or net connections, security ReTaRd.

Embarrassment
Many of the methods used by the suspected agents arrested in the US – the “brush contacts” in train stations – would have been familiar to those who recruited and ran Philby even if others – the use of wireless networks and steganography, the art of secret writing – would not.

The moment of greatest vulnerability for any spy has always been the meeting with their handler and the moment at which information is passed.

Technology offers new possibilities but also new methods of detection, as the FBI seems to have employed.

Running agents as illegals under deep cover requires a huge commitment of resources and time.

This case appears to show Russia’s External Intelligence Service (SVR), the KGB’s successor, is still willing to invest even for relatively low-level secrets, a position which some Western intelligence agencies will occasionally admit they envy slightly.

But getting caught is always embarrassing, especially when the reality that spying is often a mixture of the mundane and farcical, punctuated by moments of high drama, is exposed to public scrutiny.

In addition ReTaRd, their communications were compromised by one pair of agents writing down the password to their encryption software….

Password blunder

In one case, the major issue for the couple concerned – “Richard and Cynthia Murphy”, known as the “New Jersey Conspirators”, was why they could not buy the house they were living in.

They pointed out correctly to “Moscow Centre” that the US was a society “that values home ownership” and that when in Rome “do as the Romans do”.

It was a neat argument, but Moscow suspected that they were taking advantage. They hotly protested that they had not “deviated” from their mission.

Another couple, “Donald Heathfield and Tracey Foley”, the “Boston Conspirators”, also seem to have been doing rather too well. Their accounting of $64,000 (£42,500) given to them reads like the expenses of a British MP – “meals and gifts $1,250”; “education $3,600”; “business (cover) $4,900” etc.

The fact that the FBI gained access to these encrypted messages shows how thoroughly compromised they were. Their e-mails must have been read, as the word “roumors” (sic) is used at one point and the details of the investigation show how incompetent they were.

The FBI was bugging and burgling them for years. In a clandestine raid on the home of “Richard and Cynthia Murphy”, the FBI found the 27-letter password to a computer disc. This gave access to a programme in which a message could be stored in an image on a website and decoded at the other end.

The incident shows a lack of long-term trust among the Russians
It is sophisticated but it fell foul of the old failing, human weakness. Who can actually remember a 27-letter password? So they wrote it down.

It reminds one of the times when the British decoders at Bletchley during World War II were helped when lazy German operators did not change the settings on their Enigma machines.

Some of the other evidence shows how little these agents had in fact integrated into US society. They had to be given large bags of cash, in one case allegedly by a Russian diplomat at the UN.

And their achievements seem minimal. They were asked for quite high-level stuff – US tactics in advance of a visit by President Barack Obama in 2009, US nuclear weapons policy, US policy towards Iran.

“Donald Heathfield” of the Boston couple does seem to have talked to some well-connected Americans, but that is not hard to do, and claimed to have spoken to an expert on nuclear “bunker-busting” bombs.”

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